Produced by Nancy Spielberg (sister of Steven Spielberg), the documentary “Above and Beyond” recounts the story of Jewish American pilots who, beginning in 1948, secretly fought for Israel in its war of independence, when the Israeli military was nascent.

For several of the pilots, defending Israel was their first significant identification with their heritage. At the time, discrimination against Jews was far more prevalent in America than it is now. “The idea that Jews were going to fight I found exciting,” says Harold Livingston, one of the pilots, who later became a novelist and screenwriter. The actor Paul Reubens, who is known as Pee-wee Herman and whose father was part of this group, describes how his father bailed out of a plane and identified himself to Israelis by shouting what little Yiddish he knew.

Drawing on interviews with historians and the surviving pilots, as well as re-enactments and archival footage, “Above and Beyond” is partly a procedural. It explains how the pilots hopscotched countries to evade detection. (According to the film, Americans who helped Israel’s military risked jeopardizing their United States citizenship.) Some of the planes used were manufactured at a factory in Czechoslovakia that only years earlier had served the Germans. The men unabashedly reminisce about how their missions earned them female admirers.

These fond recollections of derring-do hail from a different era, and the movie’s one-sided view of history is bound to start arguments.

The film is best appreciated as a straightforward testimonial: old war buddies’ hurrah against anti-Semitism.